As you can tell from my post volume, I’ve had a few weeks of enforced downtime during which time a lot of thoughts have been percolating in my mind just waiting to escape :)

There’s an ongoing discussion inside Magenic as to whether there is any meaningful difference between consumer apps and business apps.

This is kind of a big deal, because we generally build business apps for enterprises, that’s our bread and butter as a custom app dev consulting company. Many of us (myself included) look at most of the apps on phones and tablets as being “toy apps”, at least compared to the high levels of complexity around data entry, business rules, and data management/manipulation that you find in enterprise business applications.

For example, I have yet to see an order entry screen with a few hundred data entry fields implemented on an iPhone or even iPad. Not to say that such a thing might not exist, but if such a thing does exist it is a rarity. But in the world of business app dev such screens exist in nearly every application, and typically the user has 1-2 other monitors displaying information relevant to the data entry screen.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying mobile devices don’t have a role in enterprise app dev, because I think they do. Their role probably isn’t to replace the multiple 30” monitors with keyboard/mouse being used by the employees doing the work. But they surely can support a lot of peripheral tasks such as manager approvals, executive reviews, business intelligence alerts, etc. In fact they can almost certainly fill those roles better than a bigger computer that exists only in a fixed location.

But still, the technologies and tools used to build a consumer app and a business app for a mobile device are the same. So you can surely imagine (with a little suspension of disbelief) how a complex manufacturing scheduling app could be adapted to run on an iPad. The user might have to go through 20 screens to get to all the fields, but there’s no technical reason this couldn’t be done.

So then is there any meaningful difference between consumer and business apps?

I think yes. And I think the difference is economics, not technology.

(maybe I’ve spent too many years working in IT building business apps and being told I’m a cost center – but bear with me)

If I’m writing a consumer app, that app is directly or indirectly making me money. It generates revenue, and of course creating it has a cost. For every type of device (iOS, Android, Win8, etc.) there’s a cost to build software, and potential revenue based on reaching the users of those devices. There’s also direct incentive to make each device experience “feel native” because you are trying to delight the users of each device, thus increasing your revenue. As a result consumer apps tend to be native (or they suck, like the Delta app), but the creators of the apps accept the cost of development because that’s the means through which they achieve increased revenue.

If I’m writing a business app (like something to manage my inventory or schedule my manufacturing workload) the cost to build software for each type of device continues to exist, but there’s zero increased revenue (well, zero revenue period). There’s no interest in delighting users, we just need them to be productive, and if they can’t be productive that just increases cost. So it is all cost, cost, cost. As a result, if I can figure out a way to use a common codebase, even if the result doesn’t “feel native” on any platform, I still win because my employees can be productive and I’ve radically reduced my costs vs writing and maintaining the app multiple times.

Technically I’ll use the same tools and technologies and skills regardless of consumer or business. But economically there’s a massive difference between delighting end users to increase revenue (direct or indirect), and minimizing software development/maintenance costs as much as possible while ensuring employees are productive.

From a tactical perspective, as a business developer it is virtually impossible to envision writing native apps unless you can mandate the use of only one type of device. Presumably that’s no longer possible in the new world of BYOD, so you’ve got to look at which technologies and tools allow you to build a common code base. The list is fairly short:

(yes, I know C++ might also make the list, but JavaScript sets our industry back at least 10 years, and C++ would set us back more than 20 years, so really????)

I’m assuming we’ll be writing lots of server-side code, and some reasonably interactive client code to support iPad, Android tablets, and Windows 8 tablets/ultrabooks/laptops/desktops. You might also bring in phones for even more narrow user scenarios, so iPhone, Android phones, and Windows Phone too.

Microsoft .NET gets you the entire spectrum of Windows from phone to tablet to ultrabook/laptop/desktop, as well as the server. So that’s pretty nice, but leaves out iPad/iPhone and Android. Except that you can use the Xamarin tools to build iOS and Android apps with .NET as well! So in reality you can build reusable C# code that spans all the relevant platforms and devices.

As an aside, CSLA .NET can help you build reusable code across .NET and Xamarin on Android. Sadly some of Apple’s legal limitations for iOS block some key C# features used by CSLA so it doesn’t work on the iPad or iPhone :(

The other option is JavaScript or related wrapper/abstraction technologies like PhoneGap, TypeScript, etc. In this case you’ll need some host application on your device to run the JavaScript code, probably a browser (though Win8 can host directly). And you’ll want to standardize on a host that is as common as possible across all devices, which probably means Chrome on the clients, and node.js on the servers. Your client-side code still might need some tweaking to deal with runtime variations across device types, but as long as you can stick with a single JavaScript host like Chrome you are probably in reasonably good shape.

Remember, we’re talking business apps here – businesses have standardized on Windows for 20 years, so the idea that a business might mandate the use of Chrome across all devices isn’t remotely far-fetched imo.

Sadly, as much as I truly love .NET and view it as the best software development platform mankind has yet invented, I strongly suspect that we’ll all end up programming in JavaScript – or some decent abstraction of it like TypeScript. As a result, I’m increasingly convinced that platforms like .NET, Java, and Objective C will be relegated to writing “toy” consumer apps, and/or to pure server-side legacy code alongside the old COBOL, RPG, and FORTRAN code that still runs an amazing number of companies in the world.